Sometime in the last year and a half I was browsing at a newsstand and came
across a brief comment about the girlfriend of actor Colin Farrell being
pregnant. Colin's comment on the matter was, "I'm chuffed." I'd never seen
the word before, and assumed it was some kind of slang word from his native
Ireland.

Now that I've learned what "chuffed" actually means, I still don't know
what he was saying!

Endsville brought to mind the Hebrew term "sof haderech" (literally, end of
the road), whose opposite meaning has recently joined the Israeli jargon.
The proprietor of a clothing shop in my town uses the phrase repeatedly to
describe the most fashionable and desirable outfits on her racks.

With apologies to j. ogden Nashious;
Every time I try to be sententious
I find that I'm just plain pretentious
And just when I'm about to be contentious
Everyone else becomes absentious.
Oh, the loneliness of a true poet-tious!

You're driving in your car and up ahead is a traffic light. If it is
green, you go. If it is red, you stop. If it is yellow, well, you
speed up or you slow down (depending on when it turned yellow or on
your frame of mind). It's sort of a visual autoantonym. "Yellow" here
means one thing or it can mean the opposite.

From: Margaret Maxfield (mmaxf2ATyahoo.com)
Subject: unpeeled

A recipe calls for an "unpeeled" eggplant, so do I or don't I?

From: Grahame Young (gyoungATfrancisburt.com.au)
Subject: Janus words

Perhaps the best known, at least to old fogies, is the simple word "let".
It means both allow and hinder. The first meaning is the most usual but
the other, in most dictionaries labelled archaic, used to appear in my
passport requesting all parties to allow me to pass "without let or
hindrance". I also recall that in the King James version of the Bible,
St Paul wished to go to a place but he was let, ie. prevented.

The archaic meaning still has current use in tennis when a serve hits the
net and then goes into play and in squash where a player obstructs the
other from playing the ball.

Maybe we can apply a chemist's term to these words: amphoterics, which
in chemistry are neither bases nor acids, but neither are they neutral -
they can act as bases or as acids as the need/requirement of the
reaction dictates.

While i was at school (in UK), I was told in an end of term report that some
homework was outstanding ... so was there some homework, I hadn't completed?
Or had some been completed to such a high standard that it merited being
called "outstanding"?

Sigmund Freud speculated that language may have first developed with one
word representing both one thing and its opposite. He cited several
examples but let's use the word 'day'. Day can be used to represent both day
and night or only daylight. Picture two people without a language trying
to communicate the meaning of day and night as they watched the sun rise or
set. It is easy to see how one word would suffice. Freud also pointed out
that when we hear a concrete word our minds immediately jump to its
opposite. Try it on friends. When you say black the first word to come to
their minds will be white. Same with up/down, hot/cold, etc.

From: Allan Leedy (raleedyATaracnet.com)
Subject: This week's theme

It's a fascinating one. Sometimes it takes a few more words than just one
to create the opposite meanings. Today's San Jose Mercury News has a great
example in a headline on page 6A: "Feinstein calls on Bush to apologize".

From: Edward G. Voss (egvossATumich.edu)
Subject: A fence-sitter

Having grown up in the "golden days" of radio, I'm used to the idea that
a station (or its announcer) "signed off" late at night and "signed on"
(the air) some time the next day. Now, I still have trouble understanding
that persons who "sign off" on something are apparently not quitting it
but just the opposite: they are signing on in support of it!

From: Stephan Chodorov (catarchiveATaol.com)
Subject: fence sitters

And sometimes a word is distorted by popular use to come to mean its
opposite. "Moot" really means the subject of disagreement but now
connotes beyond argument or not worth argument.

From: Allison F. Dolan (adolanATmit.edu)
Subject: contranyms

Words that begin with 'bi' many times have two meanings, although not
necessarily opposites. I refuse to use bi-weekly, since it means
either 2x/week, or every other week.

From: Duane Bailey (baileyATcs.williams.edu)
Subject: fence sitters

Great topic. "Renter" is an interesting example. Is it the one who
pays for, or receives payment for, a room for let?

Is "livid" one of these autoantonyms? I'm always wondering what people
mean when they use the word: red or pale/ashen?
I just checked the dictionary and it's even worse than I had thought. It
can mean 1) reddish; 2) pallid or ashen; and 3) black-and-blue. That's
quite a spectrum of colors for one word!

From: Maurice Engler (whackkAThotmail.com)
Subject: opposite phrases

I've noticed there are opposite phrases too like: "it's all up hill from
here." Does that mean it's harder because it's a struggle to go up a hill
or does it mean things are looking better and moving up?

From: Jim Taggart (taggartATphotodetection.com)
Subject: autoanonyms

My boat is fast in the water when it is not tied fast to the dock.

From: Len Ranitz (twomudpigsAThotmail.com)
Subject: chuffed or just the opposite?

Yes, the confusion about tabled (proposed) and tabled (shelved) led to
difficulties in the opening stages of Anglo-American planning in 1942.

So did using American WACs on the telephone switchboards. British
planners being asked 'Are you through?' (are you connected?) and
answering in the affirmative were dismayed to be unplugged.

Another set of adjectives that falls into this camp has to do with wind
direction; IIRC, "southeasterly" can mean from the southeast or towards the
southeast, for example. Love your newsletter--it was the first I ever
subscribed to, and I still read it daily. Thanks for the work you do on it!

From: Henry Willis (hmwATssdslaw.com)
Subject: Oversight

The contradiction is best illustrated by the United States Senate's and
House of Representatives' Intelligence Oversight Committees, which have
performed both functions, often simultaneously. They have both been
renamed; the weight of amphibolosity must have simply become unbearable.

A Janus phrase from the medical world is "to call a code." When a patient's
heart stops and cardiopulmonary resuscitation is necessary, we "call a code"
to gather the entire medical team to try to save the patient. When the CPR is
ineffective and further efforts are thought to be fruitless, we "call the
code," in this case calling it off. It can make the note in the medical
record mildly confusing, but generally the context does indeed enable you to
tell the two instances apart.

From: Michael Alpern (alpernmATaol.com)
Subject: What Timing

I belong to an online community of NY Times crossword puzzle solvers
and constructors. We are granted access to NY Sun (a newspaper)
puzzles on a three-week delay by their editor, Peter Gordon. The puzzle we
received today was originally published on Tuesday, March 23 and was
constructed by the very able, Seth A. Abel (no pun intended). It was
entitled "Janus Words" and contained 5 theme clues such as 17A "Easily
seen, or not easily seen" for TRANSPARENT or 11D "Disadvantaged, or
given an advantage" for HANDICAPPED.

From: Chris Crosby-Schmidt (crosb017ATumn.edu)
Subject: Autoantonyms

This week's topic reminds of the flipside of the autoantonym
(anticontranym?): Two words or terms that appear to be antonymous but in
fact mean the same thing. "Flammable" and "inflammable," for example.

One of my favorite examples could be seen all over town back when I lived
in San Antonio, Texas. Many streets in the city had very poor drainage,
which was not normally a problem in the fairly dry climate. However, when
big thunderstorms with lots of rain moved through, certain streets would
be covered by a few feet of rushing water. For some reason, a number of SA
drivers never caught on to the danger of the situation, and would go around
city-erected barriers and try to cross the flood (sometimes with tragic
consequences).

It was so predictable that at the first sign of a heavy rain, local news
stations would dispatch cameras to these streets; they would invariably
have ample footage of stranded drivers and floating vehicles for the
evening's broadcast. In retrospect, I wonder if it's because the city was
inconsistent in how it marked these streets: Some were "low water crossings"
(meaning the street was low), and some were "high water crossings" (meaning
the water was high).

Although slim and fat are opposites, in American slang, at least,
"slim chance" and "fat chance" mean the same thing.

From: Annie Gottlieb (a-twelveATix.netcom.com)
Subject: The last word on resistentialism?

I see that "resistentialism" struck a nerve. One of your correspondents
quotes Russell Baker: "The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man
and ultimately defeat him." Well, inanimate objects always do win in the
end. Why? Because when we die, we become one.

Modern prose has become, like modern manners and modern dress, a good deal
less formal than it was in the nineteenth century. -James Runcieman
Sutherland, professor and writer (1900-1996)